Hitting Rock-Bottom In Your Career Can Be Beneficial

A new study shows that your career crashing and burning can be just the thing to turn your life around.

This extreme bit of glass-half-full thinking comes from researchers at the University of Notre Dame, who found that losing your job can be just the thing to reinvent yourself.

At issue, the researchers say, is the fact that people are often miserable at their jobs before the end, trying, in a sense, to bail out a sinking ship.

"On the way down, we frantically do all sorts of things to try and repair the situation, and suffer as [we] fail," explains study lead author Dean Shepherd in a university release. "Bottoming out frees us from the misconception that the problems can be fixed, and in the process, frees us from other constraints and negative emotions and provides the conditions necessary to find a viable solution."

Losing your job, or otherwise striking out in a given field allows you to finally lose all that dysfunction.

What's more, starting over in a career gives people a chance to start over as people, too, with a new work identity. In short, you no longer have to "fake it 'til you make it," and instead, do something you actually want to do, not pretend you want to do at the daily grind.

A failed entrepreneur might explore how skills learned in starting a business could be applied in a corporate setting, take standardized exams to be considered for law school or engage in other low risk exploration activities," Shepherd says. "In these cases, hitting rock bottom opens up myriad new opportunities."